Paper prepared for the Ford Foundation Project on Non-Traditional Security, Seoul, South Korea, 30 January 2004 Liberal Theory and the Politics of Security in Northeast Asia

G. John Ikenberry is Peter F. Krogh Professor of Geopolitics and Global Justice at Georgetown University. During 2002-04 he is a Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Andrew Moravcsik is Professor of Government and Director of the European Union Program at Harvard University, and Visiting Research Professor at Princeton University. More information and publications, including those cited here, are available at www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~moravcs/. Please request an updated copy of this paper from the authors before citing. Please address comments to moravcs@fas.harvard.edu and ikenberr@hotmail.com.

East Asia is a challenging region in which to deploy international relations theory. A more varied and dynamic tangle of economic, political, and cultural relationships can scarcely be imagined. Economies in East Asia range from advanced to developing, from high growth to no growth, and from capitalist to socialist to Stalinist. Controversies over territory—and the terms of interstate sovereignty itself—remain unresolved across the Taiwan Straits and on the Korean peninsula. China is a rising power and Japan is in long-term relative decline. Almost all the countries in the region are engaged in debates about their fundamental political identities. The United States remains an uncertain but integral geopolitical presence, anchoring the security order through a series of bilateral alliances. New challenges associated with globalization, arms proliferation, immigration, and environmental degradation add even greater uncertainty. In all these respects, the contrast with Western Europe and North America—far more homogenous and orderly in almost every respect—is striking.

International relations scholars look at the region and ask basic questions about the sources of conflict and cooperation, and about the resulting prospects for peace and stability. Three sorts of general questions are often posed.¹ One is fundamental and straightforward, namely the sources of conflict and stability within the region. Many specific questions follow. How “ripe for rivalry” is East Asia? Will the rise of China generate the sort of “power transition” that, in other eras and places, has triggered great power conflict and hegemonic war? How do growing trade and investment flows impact conflict and cooperation? All these questions relate to the structural circumstances of states, the changing character of these structures, and their impact on state behavior. The security dilemma—where the anarchically conditions in which states calculate their security interests can trigger spirals of conflict—is the ever-present background condition that makes cooperation and stability problematic.

A second set of questions deals with the internal character of the states in the region and the influence of these factor—for example, interest groups, strategic cultures, historical memories, economic transitions, and national values – on foreign and security relations. This is a huge area of inquiry where the focus is on how domestic variables shape and constrain foreign policy. Scholars want to know about how states think about their interests and formulate policy preferences. Is nationalism in China, Japan, and Korea rising or falling? What is the impact of Japanese economic decline on its commitment to open trade and multilateral cooperation? How does generational turnover in South Korea influence the country’s view of China and the United States?

A third cluster of questions deals with the interaction between economic, political, and security issues. Some have posed these questions in terms of the interaction between “high politics” – i.e., issues of national security – and “low politics” – i.e., issues of trade, environment, and social relations. This is also where scholars debate the impact of “track two” and other transnational interactions on strategic cooperation and conflict in the region.

These areas of inquiry overlap, but scholars do tend to deploy different theories in each research area. Realists have focused their theoretical efforts on structural questions of war and peace. Liberals also make structural arguments but focus more attention on the interaction between domestic interests and preferences and foreign relations. They also focus on the impact of transnational relations on foreign policies. Most of the theoretical work on East Asia is also explicitly comparative, either comparing East Asia with other regions (particularly Western Europe) or comparing states or cases within the region.

This paper will survey liberal international relations theories as they relate to East Asia. In doing so, it will evaluate the usefulness of one alternative perspective: the work of the so-called “Copenhagen School” led by Barry Buzan and Ole Waever and others, on “securitization” of inter-state relations.²

These scholars advance three distinct claims. The first claim we shall briefly mention here and set aside—since in our view it is essentially rhetorical. This is the claim that what counts as “security” in the security studies literature needs to be expanded beyond the traditional issues of war and the use of force. In this regard, Buzan, et al, indicate that their book sets out a “new and comprehensive framework for the analysis of security studies.”³ This is a conversation within the security studies discipline about what they should study, but it is unclear whether the semantic distinction has real conceptual and theoretical utility—particularly if we look at the field of international relations as a whole, which does study these “alternative” areas. Moreover, to the extent we are interested also in the essential questions about traditional military security posed above, which are hardly insignificant in the world today, does the merging of “traditional” and “new” security threats into a single conceptual framework offers interesting insights or just muddy the water? Is the elaboration and testing of international relations theory is advanced or hindered by this move? We doubt that much is gained—except perhaps for those engaged in funding and hiring—by lumping all sources of tension in international politics, from Hitler’s aggression to the UN program for the eradication of smallpox, under the label, concept or theory of “security”. This is a curious notion that runs against almost everything that scholars have learned about international relations over the past 50 years. And even if there is a common framework, terming it “security” is largely a semantic matter of little interest to those engaged in serious scholarly or policy analysis.

Of far greater interest are two substantive claims advanced by the Copenhagen School, which we shall consider in more detail. One is that how states identify “security threats” is variable and socially constructed in important respects. What a state considers to be a matter of high-state survival is not necessarily given, particularly in an age when, for example, SARS and terrorism pose deadly threats to entire populations. This is an important question. Whereas international relations theory has arguments on how and when threats (military or otherwise) are perceived and acted upon, they are scattered. The other is that “securitization” is a desirable development in world politics – and, by extension, in East Asia. That is, when states define environmental or health issues as “national security” challenges, they tend to mobilize resources and attack the problems with greater determination. To “securitize” issues is to free them of the interest group politics and incremental policy making of routine government. This is really an empirical claim, and one worth debating—and challenging.

Our argument is that liberal international theory would be most useful in exploring these claims. Whereas the Copenhagen School has advanced rather simple claims—the perception of security threats varies, and “securitization” is a means to focus government attention—liberal theory predicts that these tendencies will vary greatly and, in the case of “securization” leading to more effective policies, is actually a rare and dangerous exception. On these questions, as on many other basic issues in international relations – namely, the sources of war, peace, stability, cooperation, etc. – liberal theory offers a rich array of theories and arguments. As we shall see these are theories and arguments that are quite helpful in exploring international relations within East Asia. But liberal theory tends to identify interests, processes, mechanisms, and so forth, that deepen, relativize and, in many cases, challenge the basic implications of the “securitization” literature. For example, liberal theory maintains that peace and stability are at least as likely to be advanced when issues and relations are pushed downward into society and community as when they rather than pushed up into the national security state. Functional integration, transnational relations, complex interdependence, international regimes, and security community – all these areas of liberal theory argue directly or indirectly that peace and stability among states is advanced not by the activation of the “security state” but the opposite, by the reduction of state autonomy and preeminence. The logic of “securitization” seeks the triumph and expansion of the state; liberal theory anticipates and welcomes the triumph of society.
IR THEORY AND EAST ASIA

It is useful to situate liberal theory in the context of academic debates about East Asia. To begin, the most vigorous debates today deal with traditional realist questions about the distribution and manipulation of coercive power, and its relations of war and peace, alliance partnership, balance of power, and force and statecraft. The Asia-Pacific is a mosaic of divergent cultures and political regime types, historical estrangements, shifting power balances, and rapid economic change. Consequently, it is not surprising that some scholars find the international relations of the Asia-Pacific as “ripe for rivalry.” It is plausible to imagine security dilemmas, prestige contests, territorial disputes, nationalist resentments, and economic conflicts swelling up and enveloping the region.

Will Europe’s past be Asia’s future? Aaron Friedberg posed this question in an article in 1993/94 and essentially answered in the affirmative.⁴ He argued that Asia lacked many of the characteristics, present in Europe, that could lead to stability after the Cold War—notably widespread commitments to democracy, socio‑economic equity, post‑nationalist political cultures, and robust regional institutions. Asia, as opposed to Europe, seemed far more likely to emerge as the "cockpit of great power conflict.”⁵ Friedberg, in effect, suggests that late twentieth century Asia may be understood in much the same way as late nineteenth century Europe, with traditional great powers conducting economic and strategic rivalries in a multipolar setting. This thesis is not uncontroversial, and has its supporters and detractors.⁶

Other realists are less worried about regional conflict generated by shifts in power. Avery Goldstein, referring back to late nineteenth century great power politics in Europe, argues that China is developing a grand strategy similar to that practiced by Bismarck – an effort to engage and reassure other major powers in order to provide space for Chinese development as a great power without alarming or provoking more powerful rivals, individually or collectively. Chinese elites, in Goldstein’s account, are striving less for Chinese hegemony and more to temper U.S. preponderance and bring about a peaceful transition from a U.S.-dominated order to one that is more genuinely multipolar.⁷

Other theorists wielding liberal and constructivist ideas suggest that Western balance of power or hegemonic transition theories cannot explain the sources of stability and change in East Asia. Thomas Berger, for example, argues that national identities are critically important in shaping how shifting power balances are perceived and acted upon.⁸ Liberals and some realists argue that the danger of armed conflict in East Asia – at least among the major states – is rooted in the dynamics of the security dilemma. China, Japan, and the United States can be driven by insecurity and uncertainty to bolster their defenses and, as an unintended result, trigger defensive actions by the other major states that lead to arms racing and risk taking.⁹ But this is not inevitable in East Asia. Some scholars argue that the American security presence in the region serves to dampen security dilemma dynamics by allowing Japan to forsake nuclear weapons and traditional great power military capacity.¹⁰

Polarity and power balancing is one way to think about the stability of the Asia-Pacific; hegemony is another. The region is marked by a variety of sharp power asymmetries, and whatever future political order emerges in the region will be one that is at least partly defined by the divergent political capabilities of the states within the region. Theories of hegemony tell us a great deal about the underlying logic and motivations of hegemonic leadership. A hegemonic state, with a preponderance of power and a long-term view of its interest, has both the capacities and incentives to create and manage a stable political order.¹¹ But, hegemonic theories also acknowledge that the distinctive internal characteristics of the hegemon itself -- its political institutions, culture, and historical experiences -- will inevitably shape the ways in which the hegemon builds political order. John Ruggie’s often cited counterfactual observation that a postwar order organized under German hegemony would have looked very different from the order actually organized under U.S. hegemony is apt.¹²

U.S. hegemony is already manifest in the region – and it reflects a distinctive national style. Overall, American hegemony can be characterized as reluctant, open, and highly institutionalized.¹³ The reluctance is seen in the absence of a strong impulse to directly dominate or manage weaker and secondary states within the American order. The United States wanted to influence political developments in Europe and Asia after 1945, but it preferred to see the postwar order operate without ongoing imperial control. In the early postwar years, the United States resisted making binding political and military commitments, and although the Cold War drew the United States into security alliances in Asia and Europe, the resulting political order was in many respects an “empire by invitation.”¹⁴ The remarkable global reach of postwar U.S. hegemony has been at least in part driven by the efforts of European and Asian governments to harness American power, render that power more predictable, and use it to overcome their own regional insecurities.

Likewise, American hegemony has been relatively open. The United States is a large and decentralized democracy, which provides transparency and “voice opportunities” to other states in the order. This creates possibilities for political access, incentives for reciprocity, and the potential means for partner states to influence the way hegemonic power is exercised. There are many moments when Asian and European allies have complained about the heavy-handedness of U.S. foreign policy, but the open character of the American political system reduces the possibilities of hegemonic excess over the long term. The United States has also sought to build its hegemonic order around a dense set of international and intergovernmental institutions. These institutions reduce the implications of sharp power asymmetries, regularize cooperation and reciprocity, and render the overall hegemonic order more legitimate and stable.¹⁵

Another line of debate focuses on theories of regionalism, again often making explicit comparisons with the Western Europe. One of the most striking aspects of the Asia-Pacific region is the absence of well-developed, multilateral institutions. It is not that regional institutions don’t promote stability, it is that the region doesn’t seem to promote international institutions. John Duffield attempts to explain the puzzle of why European states have spent the better part of fifty years intensively creating an increasingly dense and multifaceted array of regional economic and security institutions, while Asia remains largely bereft of such institutions. He offers and combines several explanations for this contrast, including China's role in Asia during the Cold War; the absence of equal sized Asian great powers intent on mutually constraining each other; the U.S. inclination in Asia toward exercising hegemony through bilateral alliances; and the legacies of estrangement and stubborn antagonisms between Japan, Korea, and China.¹⁶

The conventional view is that the East Asian region is “underdeveloped.” That is, there are few institutions or agreed upon mechanisms for coordinating policies in the region. The absence of comparable sized states with a common regional vision – such as exists in Europe with Germany and France – prevents the consolidation of a fully-functioning regional organization. In contrast to this view, Peter Katzenstein and his co-authors argue that a coherent and robust regional order exists in East Asia organized around transnational networks. This decentralized and largely non-institutionalized regional order has Japan as its business hub. Regional groupings such as APEC provide part of the infrastructure of regional relations but the networks are mostly non-formal.¹⁷

Another theoretical debate focuses more directly on the organizational logic of cooperation in the region. East Asia has been described by many observers has a region organized around “hard bilateralism” and “soft multilateralism.” The American-centered hub and spoke alliance relationships defines the security order and the various multilateral institutions and dialogues define the pattern of political and economic organization. Scholars are currently looking at the changing logic of these organizational patterns. Ellis Krause and T.J. Pempel argue that the shifting underlying forces of trade and investment are putting pressure of the primacy of bilateralism in the region. The United States-Japan partnership is increasingly an inadequate pivot for the wider economic and political functioning of the region.¹⁸

A final theoretical debate focuses on national and regional identity. One of the reasons that East Asia may not have strong-formal institutions is that it is missing a regional identity, which Europe clearly has had for centuries, despite its many wars. Asia is more geographically scattered: it is really a series of unequal island nations, geographically close enough to antagonize each other but not close enough to generate institutional solutions to the problem of order. Europe is a single piece of land with a single civilizational heritage. Asia is an assortment of islands and abutments that resist the imaginings of a single civilization or political community. If European-style regional institutions require European-style geography and identity, the Asia-Pacific region will always fall short. If regional multilateral institutions can be anchored in a more heterogeneous environment, the future of institutions in Asia is more promising.

The Copenhagen School has identified a set of interesting questions but, we shall argue, lacks the appropriate theoretical tools to answer them. The basic foundation of the “securitization” literature is that what states (or others) define as security is variable – and to acknowledge this is to open up the possibility of expanding security studies into new policy realms and explaining the social construction of security threats. Buzan and his colleagues argue thusly: “If we place the survival of collective units and principles – the politics of existential threats – as the defining core of security studies, we have the basis for applying security analysis to a variety of sectors without losing the essential quality of the concept.”¹⁹ If, as we noted above, the argument is that we should use a single theoretical template to view all major issues in world politics, on the ground that they are or can be argued to be matters of existential concern, this claim lacks nuance and plausibility.

But this sort of analysis has several different, more concrete and substantive, implications. Below we consider four.

Non-Realist factors are increasingly influencing security affairs. In its narrowest possible sense, this claim may mean that factors other than the distribution of material power influence the perception and reality of security threats. Security is not simply about existential survival, but about the promotion of national interests. This premise may sound quite radical to some, but in and of itself, it is uncontroversial to the point of banality. In this sense, nearly everyone in IR theory believes that “security” (in the sense of the absence of coercive threats to physical integrity and vital interests of states) is “socially constructed”, in the sense of being a function of differential patterns of state-society relations, whether of a cultural, material or institutional nature.

The consensual nature of the claim may not be obvious if we contrast the claim with pure “Waltzian” realism—a rhetoric tactic employed by many constructivists.²⁰ Yet this is a misleading “straw man”. A simple dichotomy between the “old” realism and the “new” constructivism neglects the substantial recent work on the democratic peace, economics and national security, the role of “intentions,” ideology, and so on—work that has dominated security studies for two decades.²¹ Indeed, in the world of international relations theory today, there remain very few pure realists—in the sense of those who claim that the sole or dominant determinant of perceived security threats, power balancing, alliance membership, military and non-military conflict, or the outcome of war lies in the balance of coercive power. Even those who term themselves realists today—often with adjectival prefixes such as “defensive” or “neo-classical”—increasingly import liberal, constructivist, and institutionalist variables and assumptions, often as primary causal variables superceding power.²² Even the few scholars who remain relatively true to traditional realist focus on zero-sum conflict resolved by deploying relative coercive power, most notably John Mearsheimer, find it difficult to explain the existing distribution of power without recourse to non-realist variables such as differential strength of nationalism, religious ideology, economic interest, and democracy.²³ One might well ask: “Is Anyone Still a Realist?” If the answer is no, as appears to be the case, then with regard to the origins of security threats, the critical issue is not, as the Copenhagen school has it, whether the perception of security varies, but how it varies.

At least as a loose assertion about one subset of Western governments, this again is hardly a novel claim. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and mellowing of Communist China, many Western governments, notably in Europe, cashed in the peace dividend and have focused to a greater extent. Yet as a broader generalization, the claim is certainly suspect. In the wake of September 11, this seems a rather rashly sanguine view of the world system. Today US military spending and intervention rises, weapons of mass destruction proliferate, and military conflict, both domestic and international, is spreading in many parts of the world. The priority on new issues is clearly not simply a matter for contrasting the pre- and post-Cold War periods. Issues like trade, finance, the environment, and human rights have been treated as priorities since before the start of the Cold War, let alone its end. Overall, this tendency seems to vary across countries—a difference that is one factor undermining transatlantic harmony.²⁵

Of greater concern to us here is the theoretical thinness of this claim. The Copenhagen School gives no compelling theoretical reason why the Cold War period should be substantially different than the Cold War period. Even if the claim were correct, it is induced not deduced. Again, the central theoretical issue is not whether governments are more concerned about non-security issues, but how and under what circumstances they are more concerned about such issues.

This leads us to more specific policy predictions of the Copenhagen School. Buzan and collaborators argue that the normal working of national and international political relationships are disrupted, and—with a new perception that core values and interests is at stake—actors act with a sense of urgency and mobilize and transform “everyday” politics. Having identified an analytical interest in non-security issues, the Copenhagen School advances more controversial empirical claims concerning the domestic and transnational politics of handling such issues. In their somewhat obscure language, the claim is: “The security act is negotiated between securitizer and audience – that is, internally within the unit – but thereby the securitizing agent can obtain permission to override rules that would otherwise bind it.”²⁶ The argument is that the successful domestic insulation (“securitization”) of an issue goes through several stages: the identification of existential threats, the taking of emergency action, and the reworking of inter-unit relations resulting from the breaking free of rules. But what exactly does all this mean? Apparently two things.

This conjecture—like its predecessors—is clearly overstated in a way that frustrates objective research and policy analysis. While the Copenhagen School is correct in noting that some international issues are handled by insulating them from politics, this is hardly new. Executive dominance over trade policy has been a fact of US trade policy since the passage of the Reciprocal Trade Agreement Act in the 1930s, and well before in other countries. Questions of sovereign debt, monetary policy, quarantine, and control over natural resources have long been subject to executive control. The EU might be interpreted as a similar “two-level” strategy aimed at insulating trade policy from popular and special interest pressures.²⁹ Moreover, the reality of such delegation varies greatly. While there are some issues in which increased priority on an issue has led to greater insulation, this is surely not the case for all such issues. In many important issues, global civil society has become more influential in areas like human rights, the environment, and even traditional security—leading to a “domesticization” of these issues.³⁰ Elsewhere power has been insulated, but in judiciaries and semi-independent agencies rather than traditional executives—a pattern of “disaggregating the state” distinctive to many modern regulatory issues.³¹ One might argue that it is, in fact, that the international issues of greatest existential importance to individuals (e.g. development, welfare provision, education, and defense policy) are those that have been neither internationalized nor insulated from political pressures, whereas it is some issues of slightly less existential importance to most governments and individuals (e.g. human rights, environment, and trade) that have been internationalized and insulated.³² Again, as in the preceding cases, the question is not whether increased priority to an issue leads to a centralization of decision-making power, but under what conditions it occurs. And whatever the critical variable is, it does not appear to be the importance of the issue per se.

Overall, then, we have seen that the Copenhagen school has set forth three intriguing questions. Little is original about them, except for the “securitization” label, but they can readily be restated in a way that forms the basis of an intriguing research agenda.

1. 
   What factors shape variation in the intensity of perceived traditional security threats?
   
2. 
   What factors shape variation in the relative importance accorded by governments to issues other than traditional military security?
   
3. 
   Under what conditions is the use of appeals to “security threats” with regard to issues of international priority a viable and effective national and global strategy?
   
4. 
   Under what conditions is centralization and insulation of domestic decision-making with regard to issues of international priority a viable and effective national and global strategy?
   

Indeed, precisely these questions have been at the core of international relations research—and, in particular, liberal international relations research—for some time. The nature of security threats has been a major focus of liberal international relations theory for several hundred years, most strikingly in the notion of a “democratic peace” introduced by Kant in the late 18^th century and developed further by Wilson, which reemerged as one of the most active areas of scholarly research over the past quarter century. The emergence of new issues has been the primary focus of international organization and political economy for 25-50 years. The use of “security” appeals has received considerable attention from scholars focused on ideas, perceptions, and the social construction of threats, including Jack Snyder, Yuen Khong, and many others. And the centralization or decentralization of domestic authority in response to globalization has been the explicit focus of liberal and “two-level” analyses of international cooperation for at least 20 (if not 200) years.

Since the conjectural answers advanced by the Copenhagen School are uncompelling by virtue of their lack of nuance and variation, it behooves us to look elsewhere. Liberal theories of international relations are useful for exploring these dynamics of global change and the construction of security. But liberal theories also tend to see the questions somewhat differently. In particular, liberal theories are interested in when and how and why societies might agree to cooperate in addressing all the various sorts of threats and dangers. Whether or not a threat or problem is defined as a “security” threat is important, but the way this issue is dealt with is, for liberals, a function of the underlying interests and preferences of states—which impose decisive structural constraints on state action. To understand this theoretical move in more detail, we turn now to the fundamentals of liberal theory.